Elvis Has Left The Building: The Day The King Died by Dylan Jones

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Elvis Presley’s death in 1977 was a last-days-of-Rome moment that punk rock,
then riding high, sought to cleanse. Presley was the first entertainer of
the pop age to take on the significance of a religious icon — a king who had
to be destroyed in order to be deified. No wonder his death at 42, which
Dylan Jones seeks to make cultural sense of, had such an impact. “It was the
idea of Elvis that we were mourning,” writes Jones, “as much as the man
himself.”